Robinson · 1990
Mary Robinson elected President of Ireland
On the morning of Saturday the third of November 1990, in the Royal Dublin Society count-centre at Ballsbridge in south Dublin, Mary Therese Winifred Robinson, forty-six years old, the Trinity College Dublin law professor and former Labour senator, was declared elected as the seventh President of Ireland after a four-way election (Fianna Fáil's Brian Lenihan; Fine Gael's Austin Currie; Labour's Robinson; and the final transfer that gave her the presidency on the second count) under the PR-STV preferential voting system used for Irish presidential elections. She was the first woman elected to the office, the first non-Fianna Fáil president since 1945, and (as a civil-rights-and-divorce-and-contraception campaigning lawyer of the 1970s) the first Irish president from the progressive-feminist political tradition. The acceptance speech, given at the Mansion House in central Dublin on the evening of the third of November, contained the line that became the emblem of her presidency: *Mná na hÉireann, the women of Ireland, instead of rocking the cradle, rocked the system, and on this rocking, this Robinson rose to office.* The Áras an Uachtaráin (the Phoenix Park presidential residence) lit a candle in the front-window every night of her seven-year presidency, *for the Irish emigrants and the Irish diaspora abroad*, a symbolic gesture she had announced in the inauguration speech and that became the most-recognised symbol of the Robinson presidency.
It is twenty past eleven on the morning of Saturday the third of November 1990, in the Members' Hall of the Royal Dublin Society at Ballsbridge in south Dublin, in soft autumn light through the high south windows. She is forty-six years old. She is Mary Therese Winifred Robinson, born Mary Bourke at Ballina in County Mayo on the twenty-first of May 1944, daughter of the Mayo physician Aubrey de Vere Bourke and Tessa O'Donnell, schooled at Mount Anville Convent School in Dublin and the King's Inns, called to the Irish bar in 1967, Reid Professor of Constitutional Law at Trinity College Dublin since 1969, Labour senator 1969–1989, married 1970 to Nicholas Robinson of the Robinson Goodbody Solicitors legal family.
On the stage of the Members' Hall at the RDS count-centre, the Returning Officer Walter Kirwan reads out the second-count result. The count, on the Irish preferential PR-STV system, has eliminated the Fine Gael candidate Austin Currie on the first count and redistributed his transfers; the second count gives Robinson 817,830 first-and-transfer votes and the Fianna Fáil candidate Brian Lenihan 731,273. Robinson is elected by a margin of 86,557 votes. The result is the first non-Fianna-Fáil presidential election outcome since 1945; the first woman ever elected to the office; and the first time a candidate from the progressive-civil-rights legal-feminist tradition of the 1970s has won a national office in the Republic.
She thinks, by her memoir Everybody Matters (2012): the three-month campaign across the country, by the canvass of every parish from Letterkenny to Bantry, has produced the result that the Dublin political-class would not have predicted in August. The country, on the evidence of the women-who-came-out-for-the-canvass, has been waiting for this since the 1937 Constitution.
She thinks: the result is the Mná na hÉireann result. The women of Ireland have, on the canvassing-evidence, voted for me as a collective political-act of the 1990 Irish women's movement.
She thinks: the Constitution gives the President a mostly-ceremonial role. The real work of the presidency will be the public-symbolic role: for the Ireland that has emerged out of the 1970s women's-rights, the 1979 contraception legislation, the 1985 divorce-referendum campaign, the 1990 emerging European-Catholic-modernity. The presidency, on the Constitution's ceremonial frame, will be the platform for that.
She thinks: the Áras an Uachtaráin will, from the inauguration in December, light a candle every night in the front-window of the Park. The candle is for the Irish emigrants and the Irish diaspora abroad. The symbol is small. The country will, on the symbol, understand the presidency I am about to take.
Mary Robinson was inaugurated as the seventh President of Ireland on the third of December 1990 in the Dáil Chamber, Leinster House. The candle in the Áras window was lit on the evening of the third of December and burned every night of her seven-year presidency. She used the mostly-ceremonial role to give the presidency a new public-symbolic activist register: the 1991 first state-visit to the Belfast Catholic-and-Protestant communities together; the 1992 state-visit to Somalia during the famine; the 1993 first meeting of an Irish head of state with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace (a major step in the Anglo-Irish reconciliation that would culminate in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement); the 1994 meeting with the Dalai Lama; the 1995 first state-visit by an Irish president to the Rwandan post-genocide rehabilitation programme. She resigned the presidency in October 1997 to take up the position of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which she held until 2002. The Áras candle was kept by every subsequent President. Mary McAleese (her successor, 1997–2011) maintained the candle every night of her fourteen-year presidency; Michael D. Higgins (the current incumbent, 2011 onward) has done the same. The candle is in the same front window. The tradition is unbroken since the third of December 1990.